…You can either ignore it and be swept away in its wake or you can try to embrace it with purposeful design and strategy.

I was down in Bray a few weeks ago, taking the kids to the Sealife Aquarium (we’re a family of fish geeks!)  Anyway they had a little video game arcade in the building with a ‘fun photo’ kiosk that printed out these neat little stickers (€2/sheet).  What I found really interesting was the the entire machine was covered in stickers that people had paid for.  Based on some quick calculations I estimated there were roughly €800 worth of stickers on the machine. This is what the scene looked like…

And here’s a close-up…

Before we go any further it might be helpful to explain what I mean when I talk about ‘emergence’.  Peter Corning has a nice paper (PDF) on emergence that defines it as ”the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”

Jeff Goldstein has identified a few common characteristics inherent in emergence:

1. Radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems)
2. Coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time)
3. A global or macro “level” (i.e. there is some property of “wholeness”)
4. It is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves)
5. It is “ostensive” (it can be perceived)

So according to the definition and these characteristics we are observing a classic case of emergent behavior on this photo kiosk.  Now I’m not sure if the designer deliberately left almost all of the kiosk surface free of graphics or if this was just a plain vanilla machine which hadn’t been dressed up, either way it is an interesting case study and fantastic potential test-bed.

If this is a true case of emergence I doubt the owner had a specific strategy to deal with sticker proliferation, but if they were smart they would have devised one as soon as this behavior started to emerge.  The common belief is that when a dynamic system approaches saturation, it is prone to new (displacing) emergent behaviors, and given that the machine was almost fully covered in stickers I suspect it was approaching a saturation point.

But in our case saturation is bad…we don’t want a new emergent behavior, one which might displace the current one, causing people to stop purchasing stickers and putting them on the machine.  So what would happen if you could design an optimal strategy for maintaining the system in a near perpetual state of approaching but never reaching saturation?

You wouldn’t want to remove all the stickers because then you would be dependent upon the arrival of a trailblazer who places the first sticker.  Then you have to wait around for second and third reinforcers before you hope to enter a phase of exponential growth.  So it seems the optimal strategy would be to prudently remove a third of the current stickers and observe the continued proliferation of stickers on the machine.

Tonight I put together an overly simplistic model of the system and ran a monte carlo simulation through 1000 iterations with values that fell within the 90% probability range, excluding both the right and left hand 5% tails.  The results are fairly intuitive…the optimistic scenario (green) line below assumes you are able to maintain it in a state constantly approaching saturation, which translates to an NPV of roughly €13,000/year.  In the most negative scenario (red line), the closer you get to saturation the bigger hit your NPV takes.

The star plot shows that among all of the variables I accounted for, saturation (green line) has the most significant influence on overall NPV.

So what does this all mean…well first-off emergence isn’t just some esoteric science idea, it can have a real and dramatically varying impact on your business.  Secondly, you can and should try to design for emergence and finally when it does happen you need to remember you are never able to control it, only influence it.

Stay tuned next week for Part II of this post which talks about designing for organisational emergence and what that looks like.

Have you seen any other interesting examples of emergence?